HOMELESS ZIMBA : MY 18 YEARS OF HELL IN THE UK

A Zimbabwean man who was detained for four and half
years in the UK has been released into homelessness.

Craig Pedzai who is 36 years old has told The Independent
of 18 years of hell in the UK.

“I sometimes think to myself, why don’t I just call it a
day?I’m tired, my body is exhausted. I don’t see myself going any further. All
I wanted was to find a job and start working, for my daughter. But I’m walking
the streets with nowhere to sleep.”

“I’m just a ghost walking around in town. Sleeping on the
street, young boys trying to mug me,” he says. “It’s like the Home Office wants
me get into a problem, and then they have a reason to put me back in the
detention centre.

“All the dreams I had of working hard for my daughter to
give her a good life. It hurts to see people going to work every day. I’m
already 36, but I’m walking the streets with nowhere to sleep. Many times I’ve
tried to commit suicide. I’m tired, I’m just tired. I don’t want to hurt my
daughter, but I can’t live like this anymore.”

Craig’s problems began in 2001, when he fled to the UK,
aged 17, after being targeted in the southern African country for supporting
the political opposition MDC party. His parents – his only close relatives –
had already been arrested for their activism. After attending a rally, he too
was apprehended by police.

“They took us into the bush and kept us there. They beat us
up, did some not so nice things. I’ve still got the scars today,“ he says,
visibly pained by the memory of being tortured mentally, physically, and even
sexually, by officers. “They burnt our house down, everything. All the
memories, pictures.“

He escaped after a week of beatings, but now wanted by the
authorities, he had to flee the country. With the help of a distant uncle, he
left Zimbabwe unnoticed by boarding a flight to the UK, arriving on 5 August
2001.

“I got to the airport. They stamped my passport and said
‘six month’s visa’ or something like that. I got out and the person my uncle
said would meet me was not there,” he recalls. “I waited there for a few hours,
nobody was coming. It was cold. I’d never been abroad in my life.

“I didn’t know anything about immigration or things like
that. I thought I’d just be here for a bit. My mind was all over the place. I
never planned to come here, or to come and give evidence to prove what I’ve
been through. I was running away.”

Unaware that he could claim asylum, Craig applied for a
student visa, which was refused. He then applied for asylum in July 2003, but
this was rejected on the basis that there was a lack of evidence, which his
current lawyer attributes to poor legal representation.

He subsequently became homeless in Leeds. He moved into the
home of an alcoholic man who offered him a room for free, in return for him
cleaning the house and driving him around.

“He said he was going to help me, only to keep me in his
house,” says Craig. “When he left he locked me in. I couldn’t eat when he
wasn’t there. ‘Don’t look out of the front windows,’ he would say. He wanted
the house spotless.”

During this time, Craig was convicted of driving uninsured,
and under the influence of alcohol several times, and was subsequently
sentenced to prison for six months, of which he served three.

He was then released to homelessness and convicted of a
string of minor offences in the years after his release. He says he was forced
to shoplift in order to eat, and that at one point out of desperation to get
off the streets, he smashed a window in order to go back to prison.

At the age of 21, Craig formed a relationship with a
19-year-old woman in Huddersfield and moved in with her and her parents. Things
began to look up. He and his girlfriend had a child and he re-applied for
asylum with the help of her father, at which point he decided to move into
asylum accommodation.

“My daughter was growing up, I had to provide something. I
wasn’t allowed to work so I was just sitting at home,” he says. “She told me to
come back, but I felt like I had to get myself sorted first, I had to provide.”

Craig’s asylum claim was again refused and his support was
stopped. Not wanting to tell his girlfriend and her family, he started sleeping
on the streets again, at which point he got caught up in a fight and was
sentenced to prison for four months on a common assault charge.

In 2011, the day he was due to be released from prison,
Craig was informed that he was being arrested under immigration law. He was
first taken to HMP Liverpool and then Morton Hall immigration removal centre,
where he was cumulatively held for four and a half years.

“They said they were going to deport me when they knew all
along there were no deportations to Zimbabwe,“ he says. ”If you’re deporting
me, deport me. Let me go die, rather than keeping me in prison for something I
didn’t do. Killing me slowly for years and years.”

Remembering the physiological impact of being in detention
for such a long period of time, he says: “You will never come out of that place
okay. If you’re sick, paracetamol. If you break your leg, paracetamol. I saw
people kill themselves in there. They are making money on people’s lives.”

Craig went through periods of suicidal ideation while in
detention, planning how he would kill himself in his cell during the night: “I
was thinking to myself there’s a bar in the bedroom. I was holding onto it and
I could tell that it could hold me. The officers don’t check from 9pm until
8am. I knew how to do it.”

Craig was released last month after he submitted a fresh
claim – to street homelessness. Following intervention from his lawyer, the
Home Office placed him in a Birmingham hostel, where he says he has to share a
single bed with a stranger. The plastic bag containing his possessions was
recently stolen by somebody in the property. Now he prefers to sleep outside.

His lawyer, Nick Hughes, from Duncan Lewis, says that
throughout the entirety of the case the Home Office’s treatment of Craig had
been “nothing short of abhorrent”.